I think the best bit is his take down of the concept of open border. The Cato Institute, again NOT a lefty org, are so invested in trying to illustrate how difficult the hoops are to jump through to get legal status that they made a fucking mobile game for people to try to navigate the process showing that only about 3% of cases make it through.
Away from the specifics of that conversation though, the sickest thing the admin has been doing is sitting on the paper work submitted by Dreamers. DACA gave these people temporary legal status that required renewal every 2 years and the Trump admin has just stopped processing the renewals and then going after the people stuck in administrative limbo claiming that without an approval they are now out of legal status. Its fucking disgusting. The Dreamers are the most sympathetic group and have overwhelming majority support even from the RW. This is the sort of thing that if people knew about it they’d be outraged, but most people have such a simplified understanding of how our absurdly complicated immigration system works that its a difficult story to tell and goes over the heads of most people.
I was chatting on the side with Magnus last week about the difficulties of making sense of a Trump admin. People are still inclined to try to find a throughline that explains a lot of the stuff that happens…x was said because he wants to achieve y. But even if you account for the willingness to brazenly lie, how venal he is, and how astronomically stupid he is you are still likely going to be wide of the mark most the time if you apply that sort of thinking to their actions. You need a completely different mental model of who and what Trump is to ever make sense of him, and I think these are best two pieces of writing on it.
This is from 2016 before he got elected the first time. Its from a guy who has a background in philosophy and approaches his political coverage from that perspective
But that is far more succinctly summed up here by the historian (with emphasis on communism) Anne Applebaum in the opening of her new piece in the Atlantic
I mean immigration is the symptom. The cause is decades upon decades of coups and government overthrows throughout latin, central, and south america and backing despots who let American companies usurp their resources for pennies on the dollar. And then, when their countries are dilapidated and any government opposition suppressed harshly, when crime grows organically out of necessity, those people are coming to the country…which pretty much stole their resources and their future.
Last year’s budget already included a supplemental $160B to the pentagon. This $200B would be on top of that 160, for an area that at its base level is already one of the single biggest line items in our budget.
For context, we’ve spent less than $70B on Ukraine in 4 years, with most of that money staying in the US. This from an admin so concerned with government spending that they’ve caused out of picket health care costs to spike because they eliminated $30B in subsidies that had helped keep down the costs people paid for premiums.
“…now give me the extra $200 B we cut from health care, scientific research, and renewable energy infrastructure to buy more missiles we can use to kill these A Rabs. Praise Jesus.”
And who was it that overthrew their elected government to install a puppet Shah that got himself overthrown in less than 20 years by the Ayatollahs simply because the Iranian government had the audacity to insist that oil in Iran begonged to the Iranian people and told the Western oil companies that they had to pay for the oil?
